NLSIU Bangalore has been embroiled in an internal plagiarism row, when a professor allegedly copied up to 48% of a report that formed part of its National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) submissions, from a number of websites.

It all kicked off last week when associate professor and chair of the undergraduate council Rahul Singh had forwarded to all undergraduate students and faculty an email from the examination committee, which had run the Green Audit Committee’s report to be submitted to NAAC through an automated plagiarism checker.

The automated anti-plagiarism “originality report” gave the report a “similarity index” of 47%, with contents having apparently been lifted from a number of websites such as flowersofindia.net, plantsguru.com and others.

Singh’s subject line in forwarding the email to students and faculty read simply: “Shared without any comments”.

It perhaps bears pointing out that the report was not an academic paper but a fairly unexciting document about the number (and types) of trees and solar panels on NLS’ campus, so it’s possible to argue that the copy-pasting of swathes of text without attribution was not necessarily academic plagiarism or evidence of dishonesty.

Vice chancellor Venkata Rao commented: “Because of the issues found just in time through a software that we use at NLSIU specifically for these purposes, a thoroughly revamped ‘green audit report’ has been submitted to NAAC.”

Singh declined to comment when contacted, while the professor allegedly responsible for the report did not respond to an email seeking comment last week.

NLSIU’s Student Bar Association (SBA) commented in a statement: “It was a report related to internal assessment of our routine University audits. In the recent past, under the current Under Graduate Council, numerous steps have been taken in the right direction to further the academic rigour of the institution.”

The SBA added: “In this light, we are seeking a NAAC accreditation to ensure that the University’s efforts and standing is amply recognized. We as a University are very serious about the accreditation and all our reports are being internally assessed to put forth a true depiction of various facets of campus life, which entails getting every detail and report vetted internally. It is just a part of the process to ensure NLS’s standing is accurately represented and accredited.”

NAAC histories

NAAC accreditation, administered by the University Grants Commission (UGC), was a requirement for colleges to apply to become an Institution of Eminence (IOE) under the government’s scheme, with NLSIU and NUJS Kolkata currently not having NAAC, as we had reported.

Nalsar Hyderabad, NLU Delhi and Jindal Global University, however, had won full autonomy status under NAAC, and RGNUL Patiala and NLU Cuttack had also received NAAC accreditation.

Over in Bangalore, meanwhile, the unofficial NLS student magazine Quirk had riffed off the episode in a blog-post entitled “Shared without comments”, which has since been removed from its website. The piece had started with:

“NAAC Results for NLSIU withheld in light of pending plagiarism claims; all audit reports are henceforth required to be hand-written on chart paper. The Nagarbhavi Laa Kaallege has been wrecked by accusations of plagiarism and academic dishonesty, in light of a recently declassified “Green Audit Report”, which was found to have hit an alarming 47% plagiarism mark on Turnitin. As to why the report was put through Turnitin at all, our best guess is that the whistleblower wanted to #doitforthekicks (Spiritus is coming!)”

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Why is it that the faculty who was in charge of preparing that report has not been named in this piece? it should be a matter of record, no? It's not as if this is a certain category of crime and one is prevented from naming the accused till a conviction is reached. Can this be yet another sign of Legally India's NLSIU bias?

So if its a "humdrum" report why this stupid clickbait headline which makes it look like academic plagiarism? You could end up harming the professor who wrote this. Instead of this its gonna be more useful to have a detailed story of blatant plagiarism of Professor AKP in NUJS in his PHD thesis from North Bengal University.

In most of your pieces, you seem to be perfectly content in publishing the names of people in connection to several allegations based solely on student accounts, simply stating that the person has been sought to be reached and has not responded over phone/email. Clearly, that's not the practice followed here. By the way, it doesn't really matter if that faculty was SOLELY responsible or not. Even had he been part of a team, he's still equally liable for this.

All are not available on shodhganga.. PhD awarded by latest nlus are worthless..Few uploaded on Shodhganga..Who cares... Scholars under NLU vcs are all flavoured... get legalised backdoor entry.... why not u cover NLU recruitment scams.

These stupid professors themselves can't write a few pages without having to copy paste so you can guess what they teach to law students. Then those students have to be reformed at the employers expense. NLSIU is running on fumes of its prestige, nobody has done any good work in ages out of NLSIU.

You should probably ask the VC about the new report and run it through Turnitin, I am sure it will show high turnitin markers as well, unless the prof could learn how to whitequote from his students. Also, you run the concerned prof's exam papers on turnitin. The questions are either gramatically incorrect or have been copied from previous years.

Kian this is no scandal. The real scandal is the shameful silence of the NLSIU community of the Lawrence Liang case. All their social justice warriors --- Menaka G, Shamnad B, Tarunabh K etc--- all quiet.

I agree. If you put yourself out in the public domain as enlightened social justice activists and offer opinion on "public issues", then to ignore such a serious matter certain speaks of double standards.

@kian, what update on that? Last I heard/read, Liang ran to the Del HC seeking writ remedy - that is certainly not going to make the issue go away, although it might slow it down.

- the case is receiving adjournment after adjournment. A hearing took place last week. Next hearing in 2019.

- Liang continues to work at AUD on a public, taxpayer-funded salary.

- Some vicious people are spreading lies about the poor girl on Twitter (I will not publicise the handles of these people). One anti-BJP troll, who holds an Ivy League PhD, has publicly tweeted that it is a case of racism against a Chinese-origin person. Another of Liang's friends has publicly tweeted that girls like her "throw themselves" at him (yeah, right, like he's fucking Tom Cruise).

- Much discussion and debate has taken place among Wikipedia's editors has taken place on whether to include the incident in his Wikipedia bio (which you can see in the talk page of his Wikipedia page). Allegations were raised of Liang's proximity to the Wikipedia community through his involvement in the open source movement (which were denied by the editors). As of now, the position they are taking is that the matter is sub judice and we will have to wait for the Delhi HC decision (of course, these standards disappear when it comes to others)

- Not one squeak from the Lutyens/Left/JNU/NSLIU femiist-human rights brigade who are quick to pounce on the right wing for the slightest thing. Remember that the media reports said that this happened at ALF before.

I gathered from present NLSIU students that the faculty member responsible for this bit of plagiarism is Prof. Ashok Patil, who was appointed to the Consumer Law Chair in 2008. This should be corroborated and reported in the main story here. There is no reason why we should go soft on such malpractices, irrespective of who commits them.

In other news, Dr. R. Venkata Rao seems to be trying to secure a third term as the NLSIU Vice-Chancellor. He has friends in high places (the present Vice-President and the CJI among others) and the matter might be decided in the next Executive Council Meeting of NLSIU which is scheduled on September 15, 2018. He will definitely push for it since CJI Dipak Misra is retiring on October 2, 2018. If he does not get an extension in the next EC meeting, the next CJI (Justice Ranjan Gogoi) will definitely appoint a Search-cum-Selection Committee to choose a fresh face.

Requesting you before commenting on this matter you may try to get/know following information by contacting VC or naac or through RTI:

1) find out Is their a committee constituted by VC to prepare this report?2) find out Nlsiu official files through RTI to know nlsiu outsourced this work to external expert to prepare this report on nlsiu campus? 3) Find out final report signed by VC, which is uploaded on Naac website?4) find out is it the same report on which you are commenting?5) if it is not, then you could have read the draft which was not signed by VC, which was circulated within Nlsiu only, not to public or naac with a specific intention/object by the outsourced expert to make aware of nlsiu campus with trees & birds pictures and its descriptions, who are inside but not aware of their beautiful campus ecosystem?6) Find out hidden agenda/ dirty politics of Prof.Rahul Singh who is behind this scam of sharing internal draft which is not signed by VC and sharing it to media without knowing/clarifying the real facts internally and sharing few days before Naac peer team visit to nlsiu for assessment.

Because of internal dirty politics, nlsiu got lowest grade among all law schools.